Week 349

This past week I’ve been working with BERG, the other side of our office’s internal wall, on their El Morro project.

The first three days were spent continuing the wireframes I began the previous week, outlining a non-public part of the system.

Wireframing seems to work like this: I arrive on a project that’s been underway for a while and turn the team’s ideas into something concrete. At this point they’ve usually thought through the details enough to create sketches and common mental models about how the website should work. I have to tease out the knowledge that now seems obvious to everyone else so that I understand it well enough to be clear what the pages look like, what information is required when, and how everything fits together. The process always unearths problems that have been overlooked, or things that different people have assumed work in varying ways. It should result in a document everyone can agree on as depicting what the website should look like, in terms of information and functionality, but not design.

That’s now done, barring small tweaks here and there. Thursday and Friday I was working on some PHP to demonstrate a particular feature of the project. It’s code that will be superseded by something more robust later but we need something to expose potential issues early on. I really enjoy this kind of coding — demo things with quick results, but that don’t require the same level of robustness and future-proofing and scalability as live, public code. Fun and satisfying.

It seems to make more sense to write weeknotes at the end of a week, looking back. And I’m happy to look back at this week — working on an interesting project for good people, in “my” office surrounded by friends. Yes.